In his films Nightwatch and The Substitute, Danish director Ole Bornedal
established his attraction to the intersection of the fantastic and the
everyday. Whether it's a morgue worker accused of murdering prostitutes or a
sixth-grade class convinced that their new teacher is an alien, Bornedal enjoys
placing ordinary people in absurd situations, then calibrating the outlandish
until it becomes plausible. In Bornedal's latest film, Just Another Love
Story, Anders
Berthelsen plays a crime-scene photographer who grudgingly tolerates a family
life devoid of adventure and low on sexual passion. After a distraught Rebecka
Hemse sideswipes Berthelsen's car on her way to a horrific crash, he visits her
in the hospital, where her family assumes he's her boyfriend. When Hemse comes
out of her coma with amnesia, Berthelsen continues the deception, only to
discover that impersonating Hemse's lover can be a dangerous hobby.
Bornedal has claimed that Just
Another Love Story was
inspired by guilt over his own marital infidelity; as a result, the movie plays
as a simultaneous apology, justification, and self-flagellation. Bornedal takes
pains to depict Berthelsen's wife as a sweet, loving woman, if maybe a little
too preoccupied with kids and social responsibilities to understand that
scheduling sex twice a week (down from a more spontaneous five times a week) is
killing her husband inside. And Bornedal makes his hero a kindly, sympathetic
gent who fills Hemse in on the fake details of their life together as though
trying to correct every mistake he ever made.
Just Another Love Story is enjoyably moody in the
early going, and it develops into a decent Hitchcockian thriller at times. But
in spite of some stylish sequences—such as Hemse's slow-motion crash, in
which the glass splintering from her windshield makes her car look like the interior
of a snow globe—the story follows too narrow a path, dead-ending in
typically nihilistic art-film violence. (This would be the self-flagellation.)
The movie is better when Berthelsen is suffering through his wife pestering him
about toilet paper, or when a medical examiner is holding up a human brain and
explaining the biological origins of the love impulse. In those places, Just
Another Love Story
is more unsettlingly ruminative, asking whether any romance—mundane or
movie-ish—is worth the effort